This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

This is my first post in YouMoz, so be gentle. I figured it was time to start giving back to the community that I've gotten so much from.

Long ago (at least in the SEO world that is) it was established that long tail keywords have less competition, and the people who are using them are further along in the buying process. Once the SEO community fully grasped and accepted this fact, article after article came out detailing how to find long tail keyword words. This was even accompanied by a few tools like hittail, which uses your real time analytics to find long tail keywords. The majority of strategies for finding involved looking at your analytics data and webmaster tools to find exactly which terms were bringing people to your site, starting AdWords campaign with largely broad match keywords and low bids, and there are even some excellent articles on YouMoz that talk about patterns in your long tail search terms.

These are all great strategies, but they make some assumptions that may not hold up for your business, or your latest client. These strategies work with websites that have at least a little bit of budget to put into AdWords, or that are receiving traffic from Google. However, there is always that one client or business that is either brand new or in the pit of SEO doom, that has neither of those things. I have worked with more than one company in those situations, and as valuable as the long tail is, it means nothing to your company if you can't find them. Here are few of my favorite places to look if your company is not getting the traffic, or is getting the dreaded (not provided) from Google.

Customer service e-mails/sales e-mails/ conversations - Unless your product is ridiculously simple, or you are incredibly talented at portraying important information about your product, you will probably get questions about it. These may come via email, phone, or in face-to-face conversations with customers or clients. If you're company is big enough to have a support staff, talk to them. See if they get any questions repeatedly. If you do not have a staff, look through e-mails with clients/see if you can get access to those e-mails if you are consulting. My rule of thumb is that if a phrase shows up more than twice from different customers, it's going on the list.

Forums - Forums are great places to pick up long tail keywords. Look for threads regarding your product, your short tail keywords, or the problem your product solves. Once you have a few threads, begin looking through the posts on each thread. Unfortunately there are no tools I know out there to create phrase clouds (hint hint to all the would-be developers). Just like with the sales e-mails, look for repeat phrases in different posts. Typically with forums I like to see a little bit more repetition before I add it to the list. This is simply because sometimes people are just talking, not necessarily solving a problem or seeking help. I would say five or more repetitions makes it onto the list.

Social Media - Places like twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are great for finding long tail keywords. Why? Because people express needs and thoughts publicly. It used to be really hard to see what someone is thinking. Now just check their last tweet. A few great places to look are your twitter followers, your Facebook followers, your competitors' Facebook followers, your competitors' twitter followers, popular hashtags, fan pages on Facebook, and groups that pertain to your target audience on LinkedIn. Statuses, tweets, and posts are ripe with long tail keywords.

FAQs - FAQs are frequently asked, which means someone asked the questions enough times to get put up on a website. Again there is no tool that I am aware of to pull phrases out of web pages(cough cough opportunity cough cough), but use your discretion. Check competitors' websites, your own website, even check business that may not be in your industry, but may be related to your industry. These are more than just great place to find long tail keywords. Sites I've worked with have ranked and gotten valuable traffic just by having those keywords in text.

There it is: long tail keyword research that doesn't require an AdWords account or a lot of traffic. Hopefully you can use these techniques to find valuable long tail keywords, and get some valuable traffic from them. Where do you look for long tail keywords?

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Comments
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These are all great tips. Long tail keyphrase research is one of my favorite past times. It's like piecing a puzzle together.

I use Soovle after I detect a pattern (e.g. specific modifiers). It shows the long tail keyphrases for Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Answers.com, YouTube and Bing. Pro Tip: In the upper right corner of the tool, you can select up to 15 different engines to do your research on.

Thanks for the post. I wonder if we don't get too caught up in all the various tools out there and take their data at face value while forgetting about good old-fashioned brainstorming. Along the lines of Dr. Pete's Big Content post, coming up with good core ideas for content takes some time and creativity.

Back in the old days, supposedly over 20% of queries were ones Google hadn't seen in the past 90 days. Since the latest synonym algo tweaks, Instant, and the recent HitWise report of one word search increases, etc, etc., I wonder what the number is today. Just from my own experience, it seems the main core ideas/keywords tend to suck in the long tail all by themselves more and more.

I am, the most recent numbers I've heard (late 2011 from Brad Geddes) somewhere around 30% i think were brand new or hadn't been seen in the last 6 months. However, I also wonder what the synonym tweak does to those numbers.

Excellent post Chris! Although numbers are indicating an increase in one word search percentages, I'm still a strong believer in long-tail terms. Over the years, I have observed the search habits of family and friends ( of course they know nothing about SEO). Fittingly, they all use long-tail phrases when "seriously" looking for a service or product, which typically yield higher conversions for company owners.

If your site has traffic already look in the keyword report in Analytics and do a regular expression match for:what|where|why|when|how|doesIt'll throw back a list of questions people have searched for before landing on the site - you'll be surprised by how many there is. Now flesh out a really thorough answer to the questions and you'll get more traffic.(Hat tip to Wil Reynolds)

Great first post!Im surprised no-one mentioned almighty Google itself as a source if long-tail ideas. Simply look for "related searches" or enter the beginning of a search term (ie. "how to repair a hole in") and wait what gets displayed before you hit enter. Wil Reynolds mentioned this in his #RCS MozCon video too (whic I warmly recommend checking out if you haven't yet done so)

I really like the related searches idea. Ubersuggest that was mentioned earlier grabs all of the google suggestions for your keywords and adds alpha numeric characters to see what all shows up. I also like to use webmaster tools to see what terms my website is showing up for, even though I may not necessarily be getting clicks for certain terms. At the end of the day it's about how well you know the vertical, the clients, and how creative you can be with search terms.

The best information you can get for long tails is going to be from your Adwords data in my eyes, if you do not have access to that then look at search scraper tools like SEM Rush too see where your competitors are ranking for long tail keywords and use that data.

Hi Chris! I loved your post, and your ideas are great. You know, sometimes it's the easy stuff that gets completely overlooked and I like that you were thinking about using resources that pretty much any company has. Great creative thinking. Now go write some more! I'll look forward to your next post! :-)

Just found out about Scoovle from these comments.Looks like a great tool as you get an overview for which kinds of content are attracting which long tail keywords. Have to say that's something we could be doing more of.

Choosing keywords on a medium basis. I.E. one set of keywords will work better for video, another set for blog posts, another set for FAQ's etc, with them all interlinked with the main set of keywords and landing page.Interesting stuff.Thanks very much for the post Chris!

Helpful! Really, I think long tail key phrase research boils down to thinking like an actual human being, and, more than that, being able to tap into how other people think. I'm often baffled to see searches that my family members type in - they're so different from how I would go about searching for something.

It can be very effective to have a website that ranks for a lot of long tail keyword phrases, so thank you for this post. I'm certainly rethinking things like having an FAQ page as it seems a genuine place to have all those questions that get asked a lot.

I can guarantee of keyword tool to search forums exists. Search for scraper, keyword scraper, etc. If it really doesn't exist, or at least not in the form that's practical, let me know and I'll make one.

This article compliments the one I just read earlier from Crimson Penguin.Here's his article:http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-beginners-guide-to-keyword-research-using-free-tools#new-commentLoved the idea of checking out what the customers asks in FAQs and forums to look for keywords.

Good job Chris! I like how you got right to the point. Some people here write an article and just carry on about nothing. What people need to understand is that, Google doesn't just return results to users using keywords, they return results to users in organic search using descriptions, phrases, etc. If I type in Google search, "The best xbox 360 games of 2012", Google will attempt to find this information in its database based mainly upon the entire phrase if it can match it up. This is why those so called "long tail keywords" are definitely important. I'm not sure why, but it seems too many SEO specialists don't think in terms of "descriptions" or "phrases", and focus too much on single keywords. For example, some SEO's will make meta tags like this for the phrase I described above in say, meta description tags, "games xbox 2012 best." This makes no sense, as now these jumbled keywords do not reflect the pages title and content directly as they should. I will be sure to keep a look out for more of your posts and thanks for sharing ;)

Most definitely. When I am creating content, copy, even doing PPC I always think about the intent behind the search. In your example above "best xbox games of 2012" I would think what can I show people that they want to see? What are they looking for? reviews? gift ideas? etc. It's the kind of thinking you detailed that is the future of SEO not keyword stuffing and commenting.

Great suggestions Chris! I’ve found out that pairing top main keyterms
to geographical areas (your location, city, and state) can also yield to some great
long-tailed terms that are much targeted, especially for local SEO. Also, checking a website’s internal site search
can provide some interesting ideas for terms/phrases that customers are already
using.

Congrats on your first
post, looking forward to many more great ideas.

@ Catalyst Online, love the suggestion for
Soovle – I had not heard of that tool, thanks for sharing J

I sometimes scan the website of my competitors using SEO scanning tools like SEOmoz, SEO-Visuals, or SEOTool to name a few. Analysing what my competitors do and what their websites are optimized for gives me some inspiration to select keywords and analyse those keywords further.

Nice article for the finding long tail keywords for our site, social media is great for finding long tail keyword. I think twitter is most reliable for this because people are generally tweet their thoughts so we can get quick idea from that. Your all four tips are really awesome to finding traffic and promote our site thorough long tail keywords.

"My rule of thumb is that if a phrase shows up more than twice from different customers, it's going on the list."

I think that's a great idea. Those questions can actually be used as fodder for your content marketing as well. If you are hearing a certain phrase or question time and again then it's definitely something to pay attention to!

Good tips here for finding out long tails. Years ago when I just started some basic seo work I used to just guess the long tails, just assumed that it was what people searched for, well it was surprising to see how bad the results were.

Hey Chris, good ideas here. I like the FAQs idea. Many times FAQs don't answer fringe questions, but do answer related questions. For example, I see this often on sites like stackoverflow. You can get answers to the questions that lead up to yours, but the people that solved your particular issue continued working once it was solved and didn't post about it ;). I think that provides a great opportunity for someone to answer the
fringe questions that are always just on the brink of being answered,
but never are.